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Saturday 30 April 2011

Joyce D'Vision @ The Greenroom for Mothers Pride

Joyce D'Vision has been booked to play at the last ever gig at Manchester's Greenroom, as part of Mother's Pride's May weekender. We will be appearing on the Sunday night in one of the last ever performances before the building is closed down. And that's the day after I dj at the Vic Bar in Glasgow for its last ever public opening! What an intense weekend that will be...




Facebok Event Page for the Mother's Pride weekender


Tickets are available here.

Friday 29 April 2011

Jilted Joyce's Gypsy Wedding Dress

Before and after shots:





From the Islington Mill/Off With Their Heads anti-royal wedding party. Still waiting on more photos if there are any of the actual performance?

Thursday 28 April 2011

Dissident "With Love From Glasgow" release

I am one of the featured artists on the Dissident records "With Love From Glasgow" digital release on Juno, along with Den Haan, Truffle Club and Helium Robots. There are 4 tracks in total, and you can buy the whole EP for £2.99 (mp3) or £5.99 (wav). Here are the tunes:













And here is the link to buy it:

Dissident DJ Packs Volume 1: With Love From Glasgow by The Niallist/Helium Robots/Truffle Club/Den Haan on MP3 and WAV at Juno Download

Wednesday 27 April 2011

Morris Gay

A picture of me as "Morris Gay" (with The Time!) taken by my flatmate Anna just before the Prince party at the Purple Pussycat in March.

Tuesday 26 April 2011

Menergy April pics.

Some pics of me from Menergy, as ever by Michael James (and as ever more will be on the Menergy blog). First it's me and Phil DJing, then it's shot of me performing "Controversy" and talking about the Facebook fiasco. That was great fun!





Sunday 24 April 2011

David Hoyle's Northern Lights - This Sunday!



David Hoyle's Northern Lights is on Sunday! Growler & Niallist presents will be there showing some films from the illustrious man's career, most notably Velvet Goldmine and his live film Magazine. Films start at 9pm downstairs at the Star & Garter pub in Manchester, and will continue til about midnight. David's stage show starts upstairs at 11pm, where he will be joined by guests Zsa Zsa Noir, Gerry Potter Poet, and djs from Club Brenda. I'm excited! :-D

Saturday 23 April 2011

MENERGY This Saturday!



The next installment of our spring season at Glasgow's School Of Art is almost upon us! This time we are being joined by special guest DJ Simonotron (Club For Heroes/Hot Mess, Edinburgh) and a live performance by drag twins Demi Monde. Munter, Vanity and I will be performing too of course, and Phillo will be hottin' up the decks. As usual drag queens get in for free, but you have to pas the rigorous scrutiny of our door whores Peaches and Claudia!



More info at www.menergy.tv - and slide this into your earholes if you want to hear our sound:



ZSA ZSA NOIR - Hey Lean Diggy Doggy
DEN HAAN - Gods From Outer Space
PATRICK COWLEY - Mind Warp
GOLDFRAPP - I Wanna Life (Niallist MNRG edit)
SCISSOR SISTERS - Invisible Light
FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD - Welcome To The Pleasuredome
MIA v PINEAPPLES - XXX Come On
VANITY 6 - Nasty Girl (Chuck Hampton Edit / Original)
SAM SPARRO - Pink Cloud
HARD TON - Food Of Love
MADONNA - Burning Up (Demo Mix)

Friday 22 April 2011

Facebook gay kiss ban follow up



So, the answer to the question posed in Wednesday's blog post would seem to be "no".

Facebook have not apologised to us. The press have got their facts wrong and are not doing their job properly. Unless their job description is to be lazy recyclers of unchecked information forced into factually incorrect stories to fit their own editorial agenda. Which seems very likely.

The story has now spread to both the front page of Huffington Post, and to the dwindling readership/relevance of Perez Hilton. Both of which get it wrong. I have stopped reading about the story and my own involvement in it, as it seems pointless, but there are two articles which feature interviews with Richard Metzger that I recommend.

From The Atlantic Wire:

The Controversy Over Facebook's Gay Kissing Ban Isn't Over


"On Monday, after many gay men and women protested the decision by putting up pictures of themselves kissing on Facebook, the company issued a statement to a handful of media outlets: “The photo in question does not violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and was removed in error. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

But Metzger doesn't see why anyone's celebrating that acknowledgement. "It's just generic PR speak that doesn't even refer to a gay kiss," he says. "The real problem here is certainly not that Facebook is a homophobic company. It's that their terrible corporate policy on censorship needs to stop siding with the idiots, the complainers and the least-enlightened and evolved amongst us
."

And getting right to the core of the matter, from Media Bistro:

Richard Metzger Contends Media is Guilty of Sloppy Reporting on Facebook Scandal

"Metzger and Niall O’Conghaile, the individuals whose photo was censored and who originally reported on the incident, have not received word one from Facebook.

In fact, the only actual evidence of an apology from Facebook that Metzger has been able to find anywhere is in the comments section of the Dangerous Minds blog:

...

A comment on a blog post isn’t exactly an official statement, even if it did come from Facebook, and who knows? Anyone could have written that comment.

And yet, major media outlets such as AOL, Huffington Post, Gawker, The Advocate, and Yahoo! News have reported on this “official statement” as fact
."

Or you could just go directly to the source:

Dangerous Minds: The Controversy over Facebook gay kissing ban isn't over

Thursday 21 April 2011

Dealing with idiots

So this kiss pic removal story still has wings. Oldstream media are finally catching up, with reports in The Advocate, Perez Hilton and even the Daily Mail!

It's funny how this story is also being picked up by nobodies desperate to inject themselves into it. Below is a direct transcript of an email I wrote to a so-called "journalist" about his coverage of the removal of the Dangerous Minds news story about the John Snow Kiss-In from Richard Metzger's Facebook wall. In his desperation to find an angle on the story this so-called "journalist" insinuates that the whole incident was cooked up by Dangerous Minds and Paul Shelter in cahoots to bring more attention to the John Snow Kiss-In event. In other words, it was a conspiracy.



I have removed the name of this so-called "journalist" from the email so as to his save him embarrassment and also bring him any more attention or his site any views. He replied with a very weak email in which he tried to copy my approach but avoided addressing my points and lacked anything substantial to say. I may post that too. But first here is my email in its entirety:


Mr XX, my name is Niall O'Conghaile, I am the writer of two of the three posts on Dangerous Minds about the kiss-in controversy. I am the author of the post you quote out of context and misrepresent in your own (really quite shoddy) piece.

Before I go any further I ask you to read the three posts we have blogged so far on Dangerous Minds regarding the John Snow Kiss-in and related Facebook controversy. Of course, you don't have to, but having seen your reply to my colleague Ms McGinley I think it important that you do. It seems that you have confused the issues being discussed. Now, this may be due to the fact that we have used the same picture in each of the three posts, but as someone who calls himself a journalist I fully expected you to be able to tell the difference between the three posts using words alone. Perhaps I am asking too much?

Post 1: Protestors to stage gay kiss-in in London pub tonight

Post 2: Hey Facebook: What's SO wrong with a pic of two men kissing?

Post 3: Setting the facts straight on the Facebook Fiasco

Now on to the real meat of the issue, your erroneous reporting and quoting out of context of my words.

Below is a list of misreported facts in your piece. This article will go to print on the front page of Dangerous Minds tomorrow.

1) "The DangerousMinds website announced today that it erroneously ran a story claiming that Facebook had cancelled [sic] a gay rights protest after two men were ejected from a bar for kissing."

Dangerous Minds never claimed that Facebook canceled the John Snow Kiss-In event page. The following quote from the article was not used to address this point, though it appeared later in the article in the wrong context:

"Richard did not state in his post that Facebook HAD taken the event page down, he just questioned IF this was the case and IF there was a connection with [the original Dangerous Minds post] being removed from his own wall. This seems to have confused some people."

You obviously being one of those people.

2) "it took nearly 72 hours for the "mistake" to be cleared up"

Paul Shetler left the quoted comment on the article thread yesterday (WST - 4/18/11) and it was reported on Dangerous Minds yesterday (WST - 4/18/11). To state otherwise is a lie, and proves your claims of "nearly 72 hours" to be false. If you would like to check, the comment appears around 40 comments down on page 6 of the thread.

As the Facebook event had been made private, there was no way for Dangerous Minds to know who had organised the event and to contact them. We are very grateful to Paul Shetler for leaving the comment on our thread and clearing the matter up.

In your email to my colleague Ms McGinley you suggest that we know Mr Shetler. I quote:


From: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: From Dangerous Minds
To: "tara mcginley"
Date: Monday, April 18, 2011, 5:40 PM

DM says Facebook removed an event - DM cries foul that their photo was removed - DM promotes the Paul Shetler event IN TANDUM with Paul Shetler - DM gets lots of Internet traffic - DM then says Oops and throws blame elsewhere.

Do I have that about right?


Like the rest of the article, you are about as right as the Pope is a girl. However I ask you to substantiate your claims and prove that we know Mr Shetler and had been in contact with him prior to the event, or the Facebook wall story removal.


3) "what happeend (sic) here is being perceived as a well oiled publicity stunt to garner attention to the situation and the protest itself. "

While Dangerous Minds cannot speak for the perceptions of the public, we can categorically state that nothing so far reported has been a "stunt", in relation to the original Facebook event page for the John Snow Kiss-In (which was made private by its own creator) or the removal by Facebook of the Dangerous Minds news story about the Kiss-In from editor Richard Metzger's wall.

It seems to me, due to the hurried nature of the writing and the use of the word "the situation" that you have not been in possession of the full facts (which are easily available on Dangerous Minds for those who care to read all three posts). It seems to me that you think the Facebook event page FOR the Kiss-In and the Dangerous Minds blog post ABOUT the Kiss-In were/are the same thing.

4) "The staff at DangerousMinds further tried to distance itself from any wrong doing by claiming that it was the misunderstanding of the rest of the media that caused this story to spiral out of control - even though it was reported on their site as fact (right here)"

Which story exactly are you referring to Mr xxxxxxx? And you DO need to be precise on the matter, because there are two separate stories and you seem to have confused them into being one big story (and in the process tarnished my own name and that of the website). To make it easy, I will show you what the two different stories are.

Story one: The taking down of the Dangerous Minds news article (which features the Eastenders still which your website itself has used) from Richard Metsger's wall is "the story" and is irrefutably A FACT. If you continue to deny this, we ask you to go to Richard Metzger's Facebook wall and show us the post there in all its glory, thus proving that we have lied.

The privating of the Facebook event page for the John Snow pub (which never used said picture from Eastenders, and which I believe you think is "the story") was a secondary issue, one that Richard Metzger asked about. and which we have already cleared up on the site (I refer you back to point 2).

Your continual misrepresentation of the facts (and yes, they are facts) at best demonstrate your own incompetence as a journalist, and at worst point to a deliberate, disingenuous misreporting of what actually happened to suit a more sensationalist agenda. I would like to end with a quote by you, used in your article, which now seems horrifically ironic:

"Even if this is not the case it is still a bold example of what can happen when sources are not checked, and facts are not verified before making claims against companies and enterprises."

On behalf of all the staff of Dangerous Minds, we ask that you retract your article and issue a written apology.

Good day sir,

Wednesday 20 April 2011

Facebook issues apology for the removal of Dangerous Minds' kiss-in news post



So the drama continues, with some news outlets getting facts seriously mixed up (Dangerous Minds DID NOT start the John Snow Kiss-In event page).

Facebook have issued an apology, but have not contacted myself, Richard Metzger or Dangerous Minds directly to do this or to explain why it happened. So does that count as a real apology?

Here is what they have said:

"The photo in question does not violate our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and was removed in error. We apologize for the inconvenience.’

Tuesday 19 April 2011

Richard Metzger on the gay kiss scandal



Richard explains the story behind the Facbeook gay kiss controversy over on Boing Boing in:

Richard Metzger: How I, a married, middle-aged man, became an accidental spokesperson for gay rights overnight

"Since just last Friday, the above photo [obviously not the above photo I have used, that is a pic of Richard, I'm just sick to death of that bloody Eastenders pic! - Niall], a publicity still from the popular BBC soap opera "EastEnders" has become the emblem of an utterly unnecessary Facebook scandal. One that's already gone international and one that I, personally, I am tangentially involved in. I say unnecessary because it never should have happened in the first place, but let me state this at the beginning of this for those of you--you know who you are-- who'll just read the first two paragraphs before zipping off to write something snarky in the comments: I do not personally believe that the Facebook corporation is in any way homophobic. Not even in the slightest. Okay?

Now that I've got that out of the way, here is what happened and why some people might think that they are:"

Read all about it!

Monday 18 April 2011

The Niallist embroiled in Facebook gay kiss controversy

So I spend one day away from the computer, and when I get back in I find I have been embroiled in a homophobic Facebook scandal. Wow!



The story is this: last week a young gay couple were ejected from the John Snow pub in London for kissing. Expressing their anger via Twitter the story caught on and a same sex "Kiss-In" demo was organised via Facebook at the John Snow pub for Saturday. The pub shut its doors but the demo continued outside anyway - UK readers will probably know about this as it ended up being on the national news.

This is where I come in: I wrote a very short blog about the demo for Dangerous Minds on Friday, and used a picture of a gay kiss from Eastenders (above)to illustrate it. Richard Metzger then posted the story to his Facebok wall (as he does with practically all DM entries) only for some homophobic jerk to leave insulting comments. Thankfully this idiot was outnumbered about 20 to 1 by people telling him to shut up and/or fuck off. I thought nothing more of it.

I came in from a day out on Saturday to find an unusually large email chain from the DM staff in my inbox. Turns out Richard received an email from Facebook warning him not post indecent material in the future. As the Facebook wall is one of DM's main channels for sharing stories, he was understandably concerned, and forwarded it to all contriibutors to be careful what we post. Richard had assumed the offending story was one of Marc Campbell's fairly frequent go-go compilation videos that feature nudity, but as the mail chain progressed I was shocked to find out (as were all the writers) that it was the post on the kiss-in that was removed.

We were all shocked and appalled that this picture could have been deemed offensive enough to warrant the removal of the entire post. It is really very mild, and Eastenders is a mainstream, pre-watershed television show in the UK. Richard wasted no time in writing another blog post detailing what happened to the original post and publishing it on Dangerous Minds. He then published the second post, using the same picture as the first, on the Dangerous Minds Facebook wall.

This story and the associated picture has spread like wild fire, having been re-shared now close to 60,000 times, and been retweeted almost a thousand times. Dangerous Minds has now crashed twice due to traffic volume, and we have been getting almost unanimously positive support. Hundreds of people are changing their profile pictures to images of same sex kissing (which, if it is between two women seems perfectly acceptable on Facebook). The post on Dangerous Minds about the Facebook scandal has now almost four hundred comments, more than twice the highest number of comments for a previous entry (which may have been my own piece in defence of hipsters - end smugness).

All this and the story hasn't reached the mainstream press yet, or been retweeted by a major figure like Stephen Fry. Facebook have yet to make a statement as to why exactly the pic and the story were pulled. This is at the discretion of Facebook of course, but I would hope that with the amount of stink being kicked up they will be forced to say something. If they don't, the cries of homophobia and anti-same-sex bias just gain credibility. As it stands, our post was pulled witihin the space of 24 hours, yet the Feacbook group claiming to have raped Lara Logan (and enjoyed it) took four days and dozens of complaints before it was removed. This to me is ample proof of hetero-normative and masculinist bias on the part of Facebook moderators (not to mention a subtle endorsement of rape culture).

The most heartening aspect of this whole affair for me though is the overwhelmingly positive feedback from the public. I have grown used to homophobia on the internet, especially on megasites like YouTube, so to see lots of people (especially straight folks) taking a stand is great. I had almost given up on this being the case - a depressing state of affairs I guess, but how does one combat something so vast, so subtle and so ingrained? I guess this is a start.

I will update with any more news, but for now here is the original kiss in post, here is the second post about the scandal, and here is the Facebook profile of Dangerous Minds.

Thursday 14 April 2011

Jilted Joyce's Big Fat Gypsy Wedding Reception



Come celebrate the Royal Wedding - IN STYLE! On Friday April 29th, the day Kate and Wills tie the knot, Growler and Niallist will taking part in the Islington Mill's Off With Their Heads with a special Gypsy Wedding Reception. Joyce D'Vision has been jilted at the altar! But fuck it - she's been to Iceland and she'll be damned if she lets all those offers go to waste. So those nice people at Off With Their Heads are letting Joyce have her cake - and eat it too.

There will be a live Joyce performance, a grab-off, a food fight, crazy dresses, a cast of characters including mother of the bride, sleazy wedding singer, gypsy maid of honour, pervert priest and a big fat gay disco and more. At only £3 you'd have to be a right tinker to say no!

For more details check out the Facebook event page.

To find out about the Off With Their Heads event (including bands, food, and an attempt at breaking the record for the longest wedding trail!) go here.

Wednesday 13 April 2011

MARY POPPERS Mix available for download



My Menergy MARY POPPERS Mix is available now to download (for about a week) from this link: http://www.sendspace.com/file/ze3wo2 - go and get it!

Tuesday 12 April 2011

David Hoyle's Northern Lights (ft Growler & Niallist Pres)

Growler & Niallist are delighted to announce that we will be showing some films as part of "David Hoyle's Northern Lights", a celebration of David Hoyle's 25th anniversary in the business of show which will also feature the best in Northern British talent.



David Hoyle (aka The Divine David) is one of our all-time heroes, and in tribute to the great man we are going to be showing both Velvet Goldmine, in which he starred, and Magazine, a compendium of his more recent shows at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern (as well some episodes of Nathan Barley and some clips from his C4 show The Divine David Presents).

So make a date for Sunday April 24th! The event will also feature performances from Liverpool's Gerry Potter (poet) and our good friend Zsa Zsa Noir, and there will be DJs from Club Brenda to help start the dance. The films will start at 9pm downstairs at the Star & Garter, before the live show starts upstairs at 11pm, and will continue through the night. For more info visit http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=216726291674776

And to get you in the mood, here's a clip from Velvet Goldmine (featuring David as "Freddi"):

Friday 8 April 2011

Menegy MARY POPPERS Mix

A new mix for ya featuring a batch of tunes that rocked the Menergy dance floor at the Vic Bar last month - cummin at ya from a pretty pop direction!



ZSA ZSA NOIR - Hey Lean Diggy Doggy
DEN HAAN - Gods From Outer Space
PATRICK COWLEY - Mind Warp
GOLDFRAPP - I Wanna Life (Niallist MNRG edit)
SCISSOR SISTERS - Invisible Light
FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD - Welcome To The Pleasuredome
MIA v PINEAPPLES - XXX Come On
VANITY 6 - Nasty Girl (Chuck Hampton Edit / Original)
SAM SPARRO - Pink Cloud
HARD TON - Food Of Love
MADONNA - Burning Up (Demo Mix)

Thursday 7 April 2011

So That Makes You A Square: In Defense of "The Hipster"

Cross-posted from Dangerous Minds, this article has taken me a while to write, but I think it has been worth it!



There has been a lot of dropping of the H-Bomb here lately, whether it be in relation to riots at SXSW, or criticism of The Stone Roses. The word “hipster” has gone from vaguely meaning “poseur” to being a catch all term to describe anyone with different tastes to ourselves. I think it was time I addressed the matter head on. I’m not going to try and define what a “hipster” is here - if you need a crash course, I’ll point you in the direction of the Wikipedia “Hipster (contemporary subculture)” page, which is surprisingly on-point. I don’t even need to prove to you that the term is media fabrication used to hate on the young - though I probably will. No. I just want to say “Enough! If you going to call someone a hipster as an insult, then you should know that makes you a square.”

The first article I ever read on the subject of “hipsters” was Douglas Haddow’s Adbusters’ piece “Hipster - The Dead End Of Western Civilsation” from 2008. The article’s shrieking headline and hyperbolic tone should be a giveaway to the author’s intentions, but the fourth and fifth parts of the essay really show the hypocrisy involved. Haddow is at a party taking photos, yet manages to complain about both the other photographers at the same party AND the kids who want their photos taken. It’s genius! And herein lies the rub - the people doing the complaining themselves fit into the neat little bracket they have described. We have cultural commentators and arbiters of previously obscure tastes moaning about the now more widespread acceptance of those tastes. We have opinionistas offering up opinions on why we should hate other opinionistas. Photobloggers bitching about other photobloggers. Fixed gear cyclists who tell us only THEY can ride bikes properly.

Using WIki as a guide, it is possible to trace how this meme caught on in the media, and came to be some sort of established fact . It was not the first time the term was used this way, and “hipster” was not completely pejorative when it re-emerged in the last decade, but articles like Tim Walker’s “Meet The Global Scenester” re-inforce the idea that “hipster” was a stick used by cultural commentators to beat a perceived threat to their roles. There was no talk of the positive elements of the emerging youth culture, a culture these articles sought to define. It felt like it was a backlash waiting for an actual scene to happen. For a time in the early ‘90s, the UK music press lumped shoegaze bands together as “The Scene That Celebrates Itself” - anti-hipster chronic
lers could now just as easily be labeled “The Scene That Berates Itself”.

Raad more.

Wednesday 6 April 2011

"The Noughties: WTF Just Happened?" Part 2 - 2001: All Eyes On New York



The second part of my Noughties retrospective is online now at Weaponizer, this time looking at 2001 and in particular the effect of The Strokes.

"God what a boon the Strokes were to an ailing rock press! Let's not forget that at the very tail end of 2000 the venerable indie music paper Melody Maker was shut down. One of the few remaining mainstream avenues for alternative musics was gone. Though they probably feigned triumph, the NME must have been shitting themselves. Even though the Strokes offered nothing "new", nothing we hadn't heard countless times before, they filled a gap in much the same way as Nirvana did exactly ten years before them. White boys with guitars, who are just like you and me - they became a rallying point. They offered something that was different from the mainstream, from trance, disco-house, and the plodding post-Britopo of Travis and Coldplay, but at the same time what they offered was instantly recognisable. Comfortable, even.

I have a pet theory, which may in fact be bullshit, but it's something like this: at a time when the new generation has not yet fully defined themselves, they try on the clothes of the generation before last to see how they fit. This doesn't just mean fashion, this can mean music tastes, graphic style, film and television references. It's happening now with the early Nineties, and you could say that it happened in the early Nineties itself with grunge bands looking back to the Seventies (for what is grunge if it's not a punk take on metal?). Of course, fashion is the first frontier to be effected as it is the easiest to change. So out went baggy rave trousers, in came ripped skin tight jeans. Out went platform trainers and in came beat up old converse. Day-glo turned to black leather and baby dummies were abandoned for self-rolled cigarettes.

Musically, rock was back. With a vengeance. The black-gloved hand on that bare bony arse was everywhere in the autumn of 2001, and I hated it! All it signified to me at the time was a cowardly retreat into safe and homogenised forms of pseudo-rebellion. We had been here before, how did we end up here again? Wearing the same clothes and smelling the same smells? With all the advancement going on in music at the time, including underground and overground dance (and in particular mainstream hip-hop and R&B, which I will be looking at in 2002) it seemed faintly ridiculous. My own particular musical journey had taken me through rock heavily in the first part of the Nineties, but by the end of that decade I had abandoned it as I felt it was boring and didn't reflect what I was feeling or thinking. I'll admit to not having felt much remorse at the closure of the MM at the time, because it didn't represent my tastes any more. Nor the tastes of anyone else I knew - it was anachronistic. But maybe we were the ones out of time?"


Read it all here.

Tuesday 5 April 2011

RPM flyer

Ah those were the days! After chatting to my mate Nick for a bit yesterday, I decided to recreate the infamous poster we had for RPM in around 1998. We put these up all along University Avenue in Glasgow but they didn't last longer than one night. Obviously we were just too early on the anti-Di gravy train.



Younger readers may not get the coded ecstacy reference.

Monday 4 April 2011

Saturday 2 April 2011

LCD Soundsystem’s last ever gig in full

Cross post from DM:



At a time when the shelf life of bands can be stretched way past the point of credibility, it’s a great statement to just stop. Last night LCD Soundsystem, one of the actual bands shaping the “post-Nirvana era,” bowed out with their final ever live show at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

They may have divided opinion with their recorded work, but one thing is for sure, they were a really great live act. One of the best modern live acts, in fact, an asset that took them out of the realm of hipper-than-thou and into the mainstream. I think I saw them four times in total, and they got better and better (as did their records). For their last show they are on mighty form, and this is recommended viewing for both fans and fence-sitters alike: